


The Next Christmas

by Ankaret



Category: Marlow series - Forest
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:39:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret





	The Next Christmas

December filled the fields outside with its usual grey and dreary light, promising neither snow nor wind nor hail nor anything much, until four o'clock foreclosed on the day and left the clutter of farm buildings to lantern and shadow.

Yesterday, Trennels had been full of the noisy bustle of four sisters and one brother returning from school, at times, as Rowan remarked detachedly, that seemed chosen on purpose not to be convenient for the trains. Lawrie dropped her suitcase heavily as soon as she was a step inside the door, complaining bitterly of a cracked leather handle and the unfairness of sisters who wouldn't _believe_ her, there it was, _cracked_, _look_.

Ginty slunk off to put on a surreptitious swipe of lipstick and make sure that her bedroom was exactly as she had left it before the holidays, since anything else would lead to heart-searchings about whether she had hidden Monica's letters safely; and the hound Tessa wound herself solicitously round peoples' legs, keeping a half-closed eye out for the interloper Daks, who hadn't, actually, come home this time, to Peter's annoyance.

"Feeble, I call it, you falling out with that Esther woman. You could have kept in with her for my and Daks' sake," he proclaimed loudly to Nicola. "Why didn't your schoolmarms bang your head together and say _now kiss and make up_, that's what I want to know."

In previous years, Ann would have taken it upon herself to notice the sudden blazing look in Nicola's eyes, and to say _be quiet, she minds_. She would probably have carried Lawrie's suitcase, too, or at the very least made helpful suggestions concerning mending the handle to save the expense of a new one. This Christmas, however, she slipped away up the stairs and left them to it.

Rowan stood silently in the stone doorway that led through to the cavernously unheated dining-room, and lit a cigarette.

"I do wish you wouldn't," said her mother, though she took a cigarette herself from Rowan's packet as she passed.

"Arrrr, but how are the lads in the pub going to get up the courage to say 'ullo to her, then, iffen they bain't got the excuse of offering to light a cigarette for a leddy?" clowned Peter.

"_Peter_." Mrs Marlow shook her coiffed blonde head. "Lawrie, what's wrong... don't be silly, of course your hand's all right, you've only had to carry it from the Halt..."

"_And_ all the way down the stairs at school, and from school to Wade station, and..."

Rowan's gaze followed the departing Ann, and then rested on Nicola, plainly enquiring: so, she still minds, then? And Nicola gave a brief, irritated upward flick of the head, like a reluctant show-pony scenting a gymkhana, which signified: I suppose she does.

\--

Today, the house was silent. Rowan was out on the farm, and Mrs Marlow had taken the rest of the family, all but Lawrie and Ann, off to see a Norman church that Ginty had claimed she needed to go and look at for her History A-level.

Nicola, of course (of _course_, Ann thought with slightly more emphasis than she might have done otherwise) was mad for anything pre-Reformation; Peter had thought he might be able to take some pictures of gulls landing on the roof and sitting on gargoyles with his cine-camera, and only Lawrie had held out firmly even against the prospect of seeing the very pulpit where brandy had been left for the parson by saying it sounded spidery to her and she had enough of church on Sundays. Now, she was happily ensconced in the bathroom two floors up, luxuriating in three peoples' worth of hot water and singing 'My Baby 'As Gone Down The Plug'Ole' with great swing and emphasis and absolutely no tune, and Ann had the unusual privilege of sitting at her mother's writing-table to write her Christmas letters.

She smiled at the writing-desk, liking the small cedar-scented compartments for paper and ink and sundries, and the worn green shagreen surface with its almost entirely dissipated pattern of gold squirls around the edge; took out a sheet of paper with the Trennels address neatly engraved on top, and unscrewed her fountain-pen and began her duty letters.

> _Dear Kay,_
> 
> What a shame you will be away from Trennels at Christmas,

 

She honestly felt it would be a shame, as well, unlike Peter, who was only too glad, as he said to anyone who would listen, _not_ to have to face Edwin across the ham ('I mean, imagine having to pull a cracker with him') or Rowan, who had made it clear enough that she got as much as her personal tolerances would bear of the Dodds in the other eleven months of the year.

>   
> _What a shame you will be away from Trennels at Christmas, but how excited you all must be about seeing America. I hope Edwin's speech at the conference went well. It seems strange to think of all those American academics being so excited about the farm log. Give my love to Chas and Rose and a special kiss and hug for Fob. _
> 
> I didn't get the chance to thank you for the advice you gave me about following in your footsteps. I honestly didn't think it was likely, even when Mother made such a fuss at the beginning of term about seeing I had a complete uniform for once - it seems like such a waste just for a year, especially when there will be _more_ uniforms to buy when I join my hospital, but I suppose Ginty and the twins will be able to make some use of it. Miss Keith is having a new science block put up, which means lots of noise and builders about the place, and some of the Fifths have been very silly about _men_ on school grounds, though I've tried to put a stop to it. The silliness, not Miss Keith's plans! Beatrice Christopolous is Games Prefect...

 

Ann stared out of the window, remembering Beatrice sitting on the windowsill in the Sixth form common-room, plump and attractive with tousled short hair still wet from the showers, exclaiming to her cronies, 'Mercy, I've got to go and have tea with Miss Craven! _Pray_ for me, my lovelies!' and one of them replying pertly, 'That's nothing. Our own dear Ann has to have tea with Miss Keith!'

Ann's hand had shaken a bit as she knocked on the Head's door later that week, but she hadn't given it much consideration; unlike Ginty (a year ago, she would have thought 'unlike _poor_ Ginty'; this year, she let it slide without the qualification), she wasn't prone to nerves. The room smelt of books and coffee, and cigarette smoke, and was lit by a lamp on the desk. Miss Keith made pleasant conversation, and so did Ann, having been well drilled through years of following Mummy around at fetes and so on. Having a very formidable grandmother also helped her to acquire poise, if only in an effort to fend off conversations that began _for how many more years, Pamela, will I be expected to take my tea in a bear-garden_?

And so she only slopped a _little_ tea out of the fluted teacup when the Head leaned forward and said. "So. Ann. I had, as you must realise, some serious doubts about appointing you as Head Girl, considering your family background..."

Ann's mind cartwheeled back over the past misdemeanours, which, she was humbly certain, _were_ a grave barrier to her position. A failure to quell the joyous riot that the rest of the form were making when left unattended with paper and glue in the Second, a lost library-book in Lower IVA, that heart-dropping time she'd opened the door of the girls loos and found three of VB clustered round an angry, weeping fourth VBite with the bin full of chocolate wrappers and a pervasive sour smell coming from the cubicles, and she _hadn't said anything_...

Her brain caught up with what Miss Keith had said, and she was wreathed in wholly premature relief. "_Oh_ \- because of Kay having been Head Girl, and Kay and Lawrie having had scholarships? Because people might think it was favouritism?"

Favouritism wasn't the word she wanted, but she couldn't think of a better one. Miss Keith drew her shoulders back and her chin up a little, and tinkled her spoon in her cup. "No one has expressed such a view to me," she said mordantly. "I was speaking more of some of your family's less reputable exploits. I can tell you in confidence, Ann, that both Virginia and Nicola have skirted very close to expulsion on occasion, and in the light of that, I must consider the message I sent to the rest of the school when I appointed you Head Girl."

Ann nodded, seeing her point so far, but not sure where it was going. "Yes, Miss Keith?" she prompted politely.

"Yes, Miss Keith. However, you _were_ the best choice available - a length ahead of the Field, one might say - "

"I don't ride, Miss Keith."

Miss Keith smiled mordantly. "No, perhaps not. But, as I was saying, in the final analysis, what swayed me was the hope that your example would provide your sisters with a chance - a last chance, one might say - to acquire some of the school spirit which seems to have passed them by. And also, I understand, there _have_ been troubles at home..."

The tiny silver teaspoon in Ann's hand clinked against the shell-thin saucer. She put it neatly down, and flicked her thick plait back over her shoulder. Miss Keith regarded her intently. "Is there anything you want to share with me, Ann? Anything that might help me to understand _why_ your sisters have these continuing problems with settling down and becoming productive members of society?"

A year ago, as a very new prefect, Ann would have told her.

Oh, Nicola would have been fiercely contemptuous if she knew Ann had told, of course, and Ginty - well, heaven knew how Ginty would take it - but Ann would have known that the important thing was to set the facts straight in front of Miss Keith, and that Nick and Ginty were just too young to understand. Now, a year later and Head Girl, she hesitated. She fixed her gaze on the solid, honey-gold oval of light that the lamp cast onto the desk's surface.

She remembered the events of the Christmas holidays. They seemed impossible as a dream, except for the hurt that still came wrapped round them, real as the sand and seaweed that the cold small waves had wrapped around the driftwood of the Surfrider like splintered Christmas presents.

She remembered, calmly - calmness came naturally to Ann, in general, which was why she found it so discomfiting when it didn't - how unhappy she'd been when they argued, and how worried about poor Edward and his poor mother, and how _relieved_ she'd been to think they'd given up at last; and then, the small anger and the enormous rising _dismay_ she felt, swelling up inside her like choking water, when she realised they'd _tricked_ her. Casually. Because she was only Ann, after all, and not even worth arguing with any more.

And she would have to spend the next ten months at least, amongst these people she'd always uncomplicatedly loved and who were suddenly strangers to her. In fact, it would be more than the ten months, because even if the hospital would take her after her birthday, it made sense to get her A's before she left, and anyway she was a prefect and couldn't let Miss Keith down, even if Kay was _cracked_ to think there was any chance of her ever being made Head Girl.

Besides, she could never explain to Mother and Father and Kay what had happened. They would still continue loving everyone precisely the same, as all decent parents and elder sisters did, with perhaps an extra ration of love for Giles at the beginning of the family and Lawrie at the end, and she couldn't bear to make them unhappy, or to make them _choose_, and besides, it was all so _childish_ to go stomping around saying you could never forgive someone.

Even if, in fact, you couldn't.

She had taken the matter to God, and He hadn't removed the feelings. So she supposed for a while in a sad, muddled way that perhaps she had been wrong, after all, and they had been right to make the dashing attempt to return Edward to his father. Except, as she had always thought but never bothered saying when Peter was in his argumentatively Royalist phase, being dashing was an overrated virtue compared to coming home to the people who loved you at the end of it.

The people she had thought loved her. People did love their sisters, she'd always supposed. But she had been a new prefect then, and she was Head Girl now.

Ann smoothed her very new, scarlet skirt. "There isn't anything, Miss Keith."

The Head looked at her keenly. "Are you sure? When Nicola returned for Spring Term, I felt she had trouble settling to work. Virginia and Lawrence too, to an extent."

_Lawrie's always been highly-strung. Gin, too._ The excuses came easily to Ann's tongue. She didn't say them. Other words came instead, troublingly fast, troublingly plausible, in a cool and dispassionate and Rowan-like tone of voice, like iced lemonade on the tongue. "I don't know what could be the matter with Lawrie, unless - There was a pantomime. Kay's stepchildren were involved with it. Lawrie had her own ideas about... about how one of the parts could be played, and I think she was upset about the way things turned out in the end. People didn't treat her the way she expected."

"I see." Miss Keith poured more tea. "You'd better tell me the whole of it, you know, Ann."

Ann's heart thudded. Had Mother written? Could Miss Keith know? No, surely not, or she and _perhaps_ Ginty would be the only Marlows wearing a Kingscote uniform this year, and she _certainly_ wouldn't be Head Girl... "As for Gin and Nicola... they haven't been as close as they were. There was a boy. A home friend. We see him at parties. First he was spending a lot of time with one, and then the other." That was the truth, as far as it went, but it wasn't _all_ the truth, and it made her feel angry and sly, and not at all as if things were righted with them for deceiving her. Still, it was said now. She stared down at her skirt, feeling as if Miss Keith could see through her skin.

"Hmph." Miss Keith wrote something in a ledger. "A very salutary lesson, I'd imagine. Thank you, Ann. I knew you'd be mature enough to be able to talk about it with me. Now, perhaps we could give our attention to the matter of the covered walkway next to the Gymnasium..."

Ann replied properly and clearly; but her heart continued to thud, dully and precisely as a muffled pendulum, for the rest of the interview.

\--

>   
> _Beatrice Christopoulous is Games Prefect. Ginty is on the First netball team and Nicola is Reserve for the Second. We won the last two matches_...

 

Ann hesitated, wondering how to put into words, even to _Karen_, who would understand, the sense of how much she'd grown over her term as Head Girl, and how embarrassing her bishes at the beginning seemed now, and how she couldn't imagine how Miss Keith and Miss Cromwell and the rest had had the humour and compassion to put up with her...

The doorbell rang. Ann started. Lawrie was still singing upstairs, and clearly wasn't going to wrap a towel round herself and run down three flights for anybody; besides, as Ann recognised, if she did, the wretched child would only trip over a loose stair-rail and break her neck. Ann put the top back on her fountain-pen, tidied her already tidy blouse and skirt, and went to answer the door.

She opened it into cold and gloom. Night had stolen into the yard, unheralded. The lights of the Merricks' farm Land Rover made glaring eyes in the dark. "Oh, Mr Merrick..." said Ann, relieved that the coated and scarved figure in the doorway was only an unthreatening neighbour; and then saw the reflected glint of the light in the hall, in eyes as yellow as the light from Miss Keith's lamp. _Not_ Mr Merrick, but Patrick, grown tall, and almost the last person she wanted to see, though she didn't suppose he'd ever considered whether she wanted to see him or not. "Oh. Patrick. You're driving."

"This last six weeks," he said, rubbing gloved hands together with a surprisingly friendly smile. "No casualties yet, unless you count my instructor's nerves."

Ann continued to stand in the doorway, aware that she was letting the heat out, but not wanting to let Patrick in. "I'm afraid Nicola's out. Everyone is. They've gone to see the old church at Wrenby Canonicorum..."

"I'd have thought old churches would be right up your street."

Ann's own liking in places of worship, which the rest of the family regularly decried, was for geometric shapes and large orange-carpeted spaces and modern sculpture. Last year, she wouldn't have bothered saying so, especially not to the heir to the Merrick family chapel; this year, she realised with a small shock, she had no particular investment in what any of the _Surfrider_ conspirators thought of her, and particularly not Patrick Merrick.

"No. They're not. I mean, some of them are, but it's the congregation inside them that matters, and the congregation at Wrenby Canonicorum have been pushed out and pushed aside to make room for the tourists, and I think it's shameful," she said, surprised at her own daring. "The vicar couldn't even get leave to put up a display about the missionaries he worked with in Rwanda, because the bishop didn't think the images were _appropriate_ and it might upset people coming in to look at the architecture. I can't think of anything sadder than a church where people don't _care_ any more."

"What if they care about the wrong things?" he asked, looking amused, and interested.

"I don't know what you mean by _wrong things_." Mother would expect him to be invited in, she realised. She held the door ungraciously open. "Do you want to wait for Nicola? I'll make you some tea."

He hesitated on the threshold. "I don't want to be any trouble - when will she be back, d'you know?"

Ann had expected them back hours ago. Lawrie would be flapping, if she'd realised how late it was, though knowing Lawrie, she very likely hadn't. She fiddled with the tassel of her plait. "I - they _should_ be here..."

Patrick looked back at the Land Rover. "I'd better stay," he decided politely. "They might ring and want to be towed, and I know what Father will say if idiot number one son is halfway home when they call." He reached inside to turn off the lights, and banged the door shut with much the same motion that Rowan used when slapping the sides of horses.

He followed Ann into the kitchen; a courteous, looming shadow. She was _sure_ that last year he hadn't been taller than she was. Only the yellow eyes, set very slightly slantwise above high cheekbones, and the ungovernable black hair were the same. He unwound the scarf whilst she made tea, and made polite conversation about his school and hers. "You're Head Girl now, so Nick tells me. What A's are you taking?"

For some reason, chatting about A-levels and the irritating ways of people who expected you to fill in university entrance forms even when you knew quite well you weren't going to university made a bridge between them. "You know," he said, long fingers lacing together around a mug, "I've always thought you must need lots of nerve to be a nurse. Not just because of the lifting and bedpans and things, I don't mean - I mean having to make life-and-death decisions for other people and then turn round and plump pillows. It must take a... an emotional range, I suppose."

Ann stared at him, never having expected to hear the words _emotional range_ out of a boy, or indeed anyone, and suspecting pretentiousness, or at the very least mockery. But he appeared to be entirely serious. "It's that or play the piano," she said simply, "and I'm not good enough at the piano. I mean, I don't want to be forever pushing myself forward, and having people staring at me. I wish I could be Kay and hear all the concerts in New York, but -"

"Concerts make me cry," he said, pushing a long strand of hair out of his eyes. "Even people _mentioning_ concerts makes me cry, sometimes. I can feel the tears welling up, now..."

Ann shook her head, exasperated, but found that he had teased a smile out of her, all the same. "There's some mince pies," she said, and got up, neatly, to get them out of the cupboard.

He sprang to his feet, ready to help fragile females with heavy trays, though in fact someone (probably Peter) had raided the mince pies in the night and there were only six left. They divided them between them. "I thought you were good as Our Lady," he said irrelevantly, licking his fingers.

"I'm sorry - what? Oh, _Mary_. In the Christmas Play two years ago? I'm surprised you remember. Lawrie didn't come in on her cue - Gin said she could have slapped her."

"Oh, Ginty was... fine..." His mouth twisted. The bones of his face were changing too, she thought, lengthening and deepening, in the same way Peter's were, drawing him away from the rest of the family in looks and towards Giles. She supposed it wasn't so disconcerting for an only. "And Lawrie was Lawrie, of course. It just made me remember, seeing your plait, that was all. How come the rest don't have them?"

"Kay did, when she was at school. I suppose I might cut it off when I start nursing. It'll be a nuisance," said Ann sedately.

He looked as if he was about to say something more. The phone jangled. Ann's heart jumped uncomfortably, and she hoped for a moment that Lawrie would answer it; but Lawrie was still lying doggo upstairs. As it turned out, it was their grandmother calling from Paris on a dreadful connection that she appeared to feel was entirely Ann's fault. Patrick waited, self-effacingly visitorly. "Was it them?" he asked in a company-manners tone of voice.

"Oh - no. Grandmother."

"How is Madame Orly? I always thought she was rather a fab relative to have, if you don't mind me saying so."

"Because she's Catholic?" snapped Ann before she could stop herself.

He turned, surprised, his profile tanned egg-brown in the uncertain light from the kitchen. "No, not at all. You do feel strongly about it, don't you? I know Nick said, about your bike..."

"Nick had no right," began Ann, confusedly furious, comradeship over mince-pies and A-levels quite forgotten. "I suppose when you said _caring about the wrong things - _"

"Look, let's go back into the kitchen where it's warm. I meant, people who care more about Church politics than they do about the Church itself, that's all."

"Oh. Yes." Ann felt cross and hot-faced and wrong-footed. "Though we don't have a monopoly of those..."

"No more do we," He held out the chair for her. "I used to spend _days_ on my knees, you know, when I was young, worrying that I was going to Heaven and Peter wasn't."

From anyone else, it might have sounded pious and stupid, as Ann was afraid she too often sounded to her own siblings, but from Patrick it was plainly no more than the unvarnished truth. She blushed and fiddled with the last fragment of pie-crust. "I'll make more tea. That pot's stewed. _No_. It's not that. I don't believe Grandmother... not over something like that. God's too _big_ for that, and besides, the Churches might come into communion..."

"It's not for want of trying, on our side at least."

"Nor ours." She gave him a quick, watery smile over the teapot. "I just think... Well, if you want the truth, I think Nicola's far too interested in the..."

"The smells and bells?"

"The _Latin_, and your chapel and Wade Minster and Wrenby Canonicorum and so on. I think she's just seeing the outer shell of the Church, and missing what's inside, when it's what's inside that's important."

"You'd sooner it was all guitars and holy pop?"

"Yes, I _would_," said Ann firmly; and, since his face promised interested surprise rather than derision, explained herself. "It's not as if Jesus was resurrected at the beginning of the last millennium and died again in 1750. I think it's - right - that modern people should use modern ways to engage with Him. He's living now. So are we."

He leaned forward, shoulders broader than she remembered. "But if the guitar people say it's the _only_ way - "

"But they're _not_ saying that!" said Ann earnestly. "Give me that mug. And _anyway_, the pop's generally so bad," she added unexpectedly, "that I don't think anyone could use it as anything _except_ as a way to Him. No one could possibly care about it for its own sake. Whereas things like the Requiem and the Messiah..."

"All we like sheep," Patrick murmured.

"... and noises off... I think people get distracted by how beautiful they are and don't _see_ beyond."

His golden eyes kindled. "It says, make a joyful noise unto the Lord. It doesn't say, make a deliberately _bad_ joyful noise. If people want to praise to the best of their ability, shouldn't they...?"

"Yes, but..."

\--

It was nine o'clock before the rest of the family returned, full of loud tales of the cold in the car that froze their feet nearly _off_, and the flat battery, and the kind farmer with jump-leads, all to a counterpoint of Lawrie complaining that she was famished and Ann and Patrick had had all the mince-pies.

"_Ann_ and Patrick?" said Nicola sceptically, suspecting a Lawrie put-on, and pushed her way through to the kitchen.

She could hear raised voices discussing, of all things, the Apocrypha. She could and see Patrick's back, suddenly tall, and out of proportion to the kitchen chair compared to last year; and Ann, busy over the teapot, looking flushed and interested, and prettier than she had since that time in the dormitory when they had argued about hymns whilst Ann brushed out her newly washed, shiny hair.

Nicola felt a chill wind round her ankles and up towards her chest; but she supposed it was because Gin had left the front door open.


End file.
